• Home

• Preface

• Alexander Graham Bell

• Telecommunications history

• How the telephone works

• Phone FUN facts

• Why the Phone Works When the Lights GO OUT

• FTTP (Fiber to the Prem)

• Future of Telecommunications

• Crossword Puzzle

• Word Search

• Glossary

• Credits

• Speech by Thomas Watson

Fiber to the Premise (Home) ... FTTP

The earliest known glass objects thought to be made by man were made approximately 4500 years ago. Glass has been drawn into thin fibers since Roman times. In the centuries that followed, light-based communications systems were used for a few special applications, but largely sat on the shelf unexplored.

In the 1840s, physicists found that light could be guided along jets of water for fountain displays. In the early 1900’s, inventors realized that bent quartz rods as well as streams of water could carry and “bend” light. A whole new chapter of science was about to be opened. Once technology had developed to the point that one of optical communications most difficult scientific hurdles – total internal reflection within the glass fiber – was solved, developments in light-based telecommunications progressed rapidly.

In 1966 an experimental optical fiber system had an information- carrying capacity of about 200 TV channels (more than 200,000 telephone calls).